= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
army1987 comments on Open thread, Nov. 24 - Nov. 30, 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (317)
I am considering deleting all of my comments on Less Wrong (or, for comments I can't delete because they've been replied to, editing them to replace their text with a full stop and retracting them) and then deleting my account. Is there an easier way of doing that than by hand?
(In case you're wondering, that's because thanks to Randall Munroe the probability that any given person I know in meatspace will read my comments on Less Wrong just jumped up by orders of magnitude.)
You could try changing your username. I am not sure whether it would change the username that appears on all your past comments, but I suspect it would. You could email and ask.
I account hop a lot, and also would like to know if anyone knows.
Will you be making a new account that will be even less tied to you, or will you stop posting on LW?
I probably will. I might also create an account under my full name which I will only use for things I'm (100 - epsilon)% sure I wouldn't mind anyone reading.
I have been convinced that deleting my comments would be overkill, so I'm going to just delete my account, which will anonymize my comments, and hope that the permalink page title bug will be fixed.
I might come back here with a different username later.
Thanks to Baughn for their offered help.
Have a nice day.
Keep in mind that you can delete posts from LW, but you can't delete things from internet archives.
I'm mostly worried about people stumbling upon LW e.g. from the title text of that comic, starting browsing the site, reading my comments, and recognizing my username from elsewhere. Granted, someone motivated to doxx me enough to overcome trivial inconveniences could still do so, but I don't think that's likely to happen enough for me to worry about it.
At a guess, I'd say that the chances of there being:
...is too low to motivate precipitous action. XKCD's pretty popular, but it's not so popular that I'd expect this to lead to a very big spike in long-term readership; at most you might want to remove your location tag (which I see you've already done) and maybe lurk for a while.
Do you really think that who you are in meatspace is possible to identify from reading a few LW posts?
I think if you are worried I would simply remove references to your location.
I would also think that it's likely that you overrate the cost of people knowing you participate on LW.
My username is formed by a shortening (though not one I often go by) of my real first name and my real birth year, and I've used it elsewhere, including in my main non-work e-mail address; so anyone who knows my e-mail would at least suspect that this LW account is mine.
(I first picked this username when I was 14 and kept using it everywhere out of habit.)
afaic, 99% of the people you meet in meat space don't read very much, let alone go through archives of anonymous forums. Internet trolls, on the other hand..
The percentage of people in meatspace who would throw an email handle into Google is rather large.
A Google search for his username has his LW account as the third hit (after the two Wikipedia hits).
You might perhaps like to edit out the username from this comment now.
Aha, thanks.
Google searches aren't ideal for this sort of thing, because your google results are tailored to you personally. Using DuckDuckGo, which shows the same search results to everyone, is probably a bit more reliable for these purposes (although in this case it gets the same results).
Not in my case. I take countermeasures to Google tracking.
Suppose that identification through writing habits gets a lot cheaper and easier.
The cost might be fairly low among people who are even vaguely reasonable. The risk of attracting a mob is low, but the cost is non-trivial.
The cost very much depends on whether you are employed in a antifragile way or a fragile way.
There's more to life than one's employment-- some mobs also go after their target's relatives.
Also, a fairly high proportion of people get highly distracted and upset by violent threats even if the likelihood of physical attacks has been low so far.
How many of said threats are not bluffs? I mean, I know that some of them aren't, but I can't get myself to alieve it.
So far as I know, these threats are quite common, but I haven't heard of any physical action being taken on them.
If you haven't been on the receiving end of such threats, you may be underestimating the way you'd react to them.
One thing people report is that they get frightened because there are people putting in a notable amount of effort to make them feel bad.
I'm not really aware of that happening as a result of internet disputes.
A high proportion of people also don't draw mobs.
I know one person who did and he has no issue dealing with it.
Given that you are a woman I can understand that it's a more reasonable risk for you. Unfortunately online women get attacked more easily and more nasty than a lot of men.
Still you have chosen to be quite open.
I've chosen to be open because it feels like the right thing for me to do. I have no idea whether I'm taking an excessive risk.
What I've heard is that men are more likely to get attacked (makes sense given where they hang out), it's just that women are more likely to make a big deal of it.
Why not use your real name and own what you write?
This certainly isn't a safe option for everyone.
I would own much but not all of what I've written on LW, and selectively deleting only the things I wouldn't own would take infeasibly long.
How badly do you want to delete everything? There might be easier options, but if there aren't I can certainly cook up a mass-deletion script. Just, I don't want to test it on my own account so you'd need to let me access yours.
(Yes, I could make a test account for the purpose. That would be more work.)
EDIT: I got a little way into implementing this before [deleted] bade me stop, thus the spate of retracted comments. Hopefully ve'll change ver mind, as some of those comments were quite interesting; however, this has gotten me thinking. The site has a comment deletion option, but not if you're deleting your account entirely; should it have that? If we don't want people to do use it, but still leave the scripting option open, am I expected not to use that option?
You might perhaps like to edit out the username from this comment now.
Right, thanks.
As of now, after both you and lfghjkl suggested me not to delete valuable comments, I'm leaning towards just deleting my account. (I've already removed my location from it as per ChristianKl's suggestion.) If I was in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber I'd delete all comments excepts those with positive karma which I wouldn't mind anybody I know reading, but...
(BTW FWIW I'm a “he”.)
Use this to find your comments that have negative karma (you do not have that many of those, it will not be that time-consuming to delete them manually) and/or contain certain keywords. Then you can delete them without having to delete everything.
I'm not going to remember that. My memory for people isn't small, but it's mostly taken up by fictional ones.
?! But your name seems even less tractable to yourself than mine is, and I don't worry about that!
(also, if you take into account the probability that they will link those comments to you, and that they will think badly of you because of it, no?)
The easiest solution is to just delete your current account and start a new one. None of your meatspace friends could then know which posts from [deleted] was from you or even that any of them came from you in the first place (unless they are an LW admin, but then I don't think you should be worried about them knowing you post here).
This solution also has the benefit of not removing valuable comments in old threads (which looking at your karma I assume there are many of).
You can still tell who wrote such comments by following the permalink and looking at the title of the page.
Wow, you're right. Someone should probably fix that.
At least deleting your account will make it very hard to track down any of your old posts unless they already know which comments to look for, so if they aren't already aware of LW you'd probably be safe.
Why are you concerned about this?
I've written things about other people without their consent, figuring there would be a negligible chance anybody could guess who they were. But now I think that chance, while still not huge, is no longer that negligible.
(I've also written certain politically incorrect things, but as someone working in a non-humanities field over 4000 miles away from Harvard, and who isn't going to apply for a job in the US any time soon, and likely not anywhere else in the Anglosphere either, I'm not terribly worried about that.)
Searching Google for your username leads to a Wikipedia account with fairly detailed information which should be easily identifiable to people who know you personally, so if someone suspected your identity they could probably easily verify it.
Could you just delete those things?
It'd be a hell of a lot of work to find all of them.